wooden-headed old fellows could tell did they but choose to speak! At

what unsuspected comedies and tragedies have they not assisted! What
bitter tears have been sobbed into that old sofa cushion! What

passionate whisperings the settee must have overheard!
New furniture has no charms for me compared with old. It is the old

things that we love--the old faces, the old books, the old jokes. New
furniture can make a palace, but it takes old furniture to make a

home. Not merely old in itself--lodging-house furniture generally is
that--but it must be old to us, old in associations and recollections.

The furniture of furnished apartments, however ancient it may be in
reality, is new to our eyes, and we feel as though we could never get

on with it. As, too, in the case of all fresh acquaintances, whether
wooden or human (and there is very little difference between the two

species sometimes), everything impresses you with its worst aspect.
The knobby wood-work and shiny horse-hair covering of the easy-chair

suggest anything but ease. The mirror is smoky. The curtains want
washing. The carpet is frayed. The table looks as if it would go

over the instant anything was rested on it. The grate is cheerless,
the wall-paper hideous. The ceiling appears to have had coffee spilt

all over it, and the ornaments--well, they are worse than the
wallpaper.

There must surely be some special and secret manufactory for the
production of lodging-house ornaments. Precisely the same articles

are to be found at every lodging-house all over the kingdom, and they
are never seen anywhere else. There are the two--what do you call

them? they stand one at each end of the mantel-piece, where they are
never safe, and they are hung round with long triangular slips of

glass that clank against one another and make you nervous. In the
commoner class of rooms these works of art are supplemented by a

couple of pieces of china which might each be meant to represent a cow
sitting upon its hind legs, or a model of the temple of Diana at

Ephesus, or a dog, or anything else you like to fancy. Somewhere
about the room you come across a bilious-looking object, which at

first you take to be a lump of dough left about by one of the
children, but which on scrutiny seems to resemble an underdone cupid.

This thing the landlady calls a statue. Then there is a "sampler"
worked by some idiot related to the family, a picture of the

"Huguenots," two or three Scripture texts, and a highly framed and
glazed certificate to the effect that the father has been vaccinated,

or is an Odd Fellow, or something of that sort.
You examine these various attractions and then dismally ask what the

rent is.
"That's rather a good deal," you say on hearing the figure.

"Well, to tell you the truth," answers the landlady with a sudden
burst of candor, "I've always had" (mentioning a sum a good deal in

excess of the first-named amount), "and before that I used to have" (a
still higher figure).

What the rent of apartments must have been twenty years ago makes one
shudder to think of. Every landlady makes you feel thoroughlyashamed

of yourself by informing you, whenever the subject crops up, that she
used to get twice as much for her rooms as you are paying. Young men

lodgers of the last generation must have been of a wealthier class
than they are now, or they must have ruined themselves. I should have

had to live in an attic.
Curious, that in lodgings the rule of life is reversed. The higher

you get up in the world the lower you come down in your lodgings. On
the lodging-house ladder the poor man is at the top, the rich man

underneath. You start in the attic and work your way down to the
first floor.

A good many great men have lived in attics and some have died there.
Attics, says the dictionary, are "places where lumber is stored," and

the world has used them to store a good deal of its lumber in at one
time or another. Its preachers and painters and poets, its

deep-browed men who will find out things, its fire-eyed men who will
tell truths that no one wants to hear--these are the lumber that the

world hides away in its attics. Haydn grew up in an attic and
Chatterton starved in one. Addison and Goldsmith wrote in garrets.

Faraday and De Quincey knew them well. Dr. Johnson camped cheerfully
in them, sleeping soundly--too soundly sometimes--upon their

trundle-beds, like the sturdy old soldier of fortune that he was,
inured to hardship and all careless of himself. Dickens spent his

youth among them, Morland his old age--alas! a drunken, premature old
age. Hans Andersen, the fairy king, dreamed his sweet fancies beneath

their sloping roofs. Poor, wayward-hearted Collins leaned his head
upon their crazy tables; priggish Benjamin Franklin; Savage, the

wrong-headed, much troubled when he could afford any softer bed than a
doorstep; young Bloomfield, "Bobby" Burns, Hogarth, Watts the

engineer--the roll is endless. Ever since the habitations of men were
reared two stories high has the garret been the nursery of genius.

No one who honors the aristocracy of mind can feel ashamed of
acquaintanceship with them. Their damp-stained walls are sacred to

the memory of noble names. If all the wisdom of the world and all its
art--all the spoils that it has won from nature, all the fire that it

has snatched from heaven--were gathered together and divided into
heaps, and we could point and say, for instance, these mighty truths

were flashed forth in the brilliant _salon_ amid the ripple of light
laughter and the sparkle of bright eyes; and this deep knowledge was

dug up in the quiet study, where the bust of Pallas looks serenely
down on the leather-scented shelves; and this heap belongs to the

crowded street; and that to the daisied field--the heap that would
tower up high above the rest as a mountain above hills would be the

one at which we should look up and say: this noblest pile of
all--these glorious paintings and this wondrous music, these trumpet

words, these solemn thoughts, these daring deeds, they were forged and
fashioned amid misery and pain in the sordid squalor of the city

garret. There, from their eyries, while the world heaved and throbbed
below, the kings of men sent forth their eagle thoughts to wing their

flight through the ages. There, where the sunlight streaming through
the broken panes fell on rotting boards and crumbling walls; there,

from their lofty thrones, those rag-clothed Joves have hurled their
thunderbolts and shaken, before now, the earth to its foundations.

Huddle them up in your lumber-rooms, oh, world! Shut them fast in and
turn the key of poverty upon them. Weld close the bars, and let them

fret their hero lives away within the narrow cage. Leave them there
to starve, and rot, and die. Laugh at the frenzied beatings of their

hands against the door. Roll onward in your dust and noise and pass
them by, forgotten.

But take care lest they turn and sting you. All do not, like the
fabled phoenix, warble sweet melodies in their agony; sometimes they

spit venom--venom you must breathe whether you will or no, for you
cannot seal their mouths, though you may fetter their limbs. You can

lock the door upon them, but they burst open their shaky lattices and
call out over the house-tops so that men cannot but hear. You hounded

wild Rousseau into the meanest garret of the Rue St. Jacques and
jeered at his angry shrieks. But the thin, piping tones swelled a

hundred years later into the sullen roar of the French Revolution, and
civilization to this day is quivering to the reverberations of his

voice.
As for myself, however, I like an attic. Not to live in: as

residences they are inconvenient. There is too much getting up and
down stairs connected with them to please me. It puts one

unpleasantly in mind of the tread-mill. The form of the ceiling
offers too many facilities for bumping your head and too few for

shaving. And the note of the tomcat as he sings to his love in the
stilly night outside on the tiles becomes positivelydistasteful when

heard so near.
No, for living in give me a suit of rooms on the first floor of a

Piccadilly mansion (I wish somebody would!); but for thinking in let
me have an attic up ten flights of stairs in the densest quarter of

the city. I have all Herr Teufelsdrockh's affection for attics.
There is a sublimity about their loftiness. I love to "sit at ease

and look down upon the wasps' nest beneath;" to listen to the dull
murmur of the human tide ebbing and flowing ceaselessly through the